One in five people in the EU and nearly one in ten in the world are now aged 65 and over. This demographic transformation is one of the great successes of the twentieth century and has been the focus of a large scholarship in the social sciences. Ageing has also profoundly altered the composition of electorates in many democracies. My new article for the political quarterly entitled “The Politics of Economic Stagnation in Ageing Democracies” explores whether and how this population ageing reshapes the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I argue that ageing changes the economic and policy priorities of a growing share of democracies’ electorates in ways that incentivise elected governments to prioritise certain social policies and economic outcomes, such as pensions and low inflation, at the expense of others, most notably greater social investments and pursuing economic growth. As a result, gerontocracies increasingly lead to what I call a ‘gerontonomia’ characterised by democratically sustained economic stagnation.

A summary of this article has appeared in the political quarterly blog and the LSE Europe blog. A more extensive version of this research project has been published as a Nuffield College working paper at the University of Oxford.